The Ghosts We Feed
Marion stood before the bathroom mirror at 2 AM, running her fingers through hair that had begun to gray at thirty-two. In the apartment below, her neighbors' music thumped—some bass-heavy remix that made her teeth ache. She should be sleeping. Instead, she was watching herself disappear.
She'd started feeling like a zombie three months ago, after David moved out. Not the brain-eating kind—the other kind. The kind that goes to work and answers emails and smiles at coworkers while something inside rots away unnoticed.
Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from him: 'Left my hat. Can I come by Sunday?'
Sunday. As if scheduling grief made it manageable.
In the living room, the goldfish David had given her two years ago—'something alive to come home to,' he'd said—swam in tight, obsessive circles. Bowl was too small. She knew it. David knew it. Neither of them had done anything about it.
The fish stared at her with its vacuous, unblinking eye.
'You too, huh?' she whispered.
She should just break up with him properly this time. Not this drawn-out thing where they text about hats and fish and never say what they mean. But the truth was, she didn't want to be alone again. The city outside her window was filled with people exactly like her—haunted by the lives they thought they'd have, dragging themselves through days that felt borrowed, feeding ghosts they couldn't quite name.
The goldfish bumped its head against the glass. Again. Again.
Marion turned off the bathroom light. In the darkness, she could almost believe she was still whole. She could almost believe that somewhere, in some parallel timeline, she and David were happy. That the fish swam in oceans. That she slept soundly.
She crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head, waiting for an alarm that felt less like a beginning and more like a sentence, counting down the hours until Sunday, when she'd open the door and find David standing there with his hat in his hands, both of them pretending they didn't know it was already too late.